Low morale and high vacancy rates, aid workers who say they are treated like office supplies, warnings against organized strikes, and a “virtual caste system” of inequitable hiring mechanisms.
For years, the United States Agency for International Development has been warned that its workforce system is broken and that its leaders need a strategic vision for something more sustainable and better suited to advancing America’s foreign aid priorities.
In recent months, those warnings have broken out into a string of workforce-related fires that have thrown parts of the U.S. government’s bilateral aid agency into disarray — even while it tries to sustain a massive humanitarian operation in Ukraine and safeguard health programs against the COVID-19 pandemic.